You just can't compare some things. Apples with oranges with example - well not in a meaningful way anyway. But we seem obsessed with putting everything in some kind of relative order.
Perhaps because it helps us navigate this ever more complex world - the world in which Sainsbury's now puts traffic lights on food to alert the thickies to the previously unknown dangers of doughnuts.
The wireless (seems suitable to use these sort of words when having a green-ink tinged rant) was blasting out news this morning that the Government is considering reclassifying Ecstasy as a 'safer' drug than cocaine and heroine.
Class B rather than A, and therefore one league 'above' cannabis, which used to enjoy class B privileges before it was downgraded to C. Although it might pop up again soon.
I can see why drugs need to be classified for legal purposes (assuming they should remain illegal, that is), but what this over-simplification of drugs does is actually rather dangerous.
ALL drugs have side-effects, legal or otherwise. Some are mild, some severe; some mental, some physical; some temporary (we bravely say, without that long a study having been done on longer term effects), and some permanent.
Ecstasy heats your body up as it encourages increased electrical activity in the brain; coke does likewise as it causes your heart to beat faster - but the way it does this is subtley different. Cannabis acts in a totally different way, but its longer term mental effects may be even 'worse'.
What do I mean by worse? I'm not sure. Perhaps I'd rather have a fucked heart than a fucked head. I really don't know. But I do know that it's not as simple as A v. B v. C.
It's too simple, and sometimes we need to avoid making things simple that shoudn't be.
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